“What have you done with her?” Ben asked again, turning toward Lenz as if coming out of a stupor. He was beyond anger now. He was in another, calmer place. He was thinking about killing Jürgen Lenz, realizing with peculiar satisfaction that he did in fact have it in him to kill another person.

  And he was thinking about how he would find Anna. I’ll listen to you, you bastard. I’ll be civil and obedient and I’ll let you talk until you take me to her.

  And then I’ll kill you.

  Lenz looked at him, unblinking, and then continued his explanation. “I expect you’ve figured out the basic scenario. Quite simply, what his work promised was the opportunity to explore the limits of mortality. A man lives for a hundred years if he’s lucky. Mice only get two years. Galapagos tortoises can live two hundred years. Now, why in the world is that? Has nature dictated these arbitrary limits?”

  Lenz had begun pacing slowly back and forth in front of Ben, his guards standing watch. “Even though my father was forced to move to South America, he continued to direct his research institute here long-distance. Traveled back and forth several times a year. In the late fifties one of his scientists made an intriguing discovery—that every time a human cell divides, its chromosomes, those tiny spindles of DNA, become shorter! Microscopically shorter, yes, but still, measurably so. So what was it, exactly, that was getting shorter? It took years to discover the answer.” He smiled again. “Father was right. The secret really was in our cells.”

  “The chromosomes,” Ben said. He was beginning to understand.

  Father was right.

  He had an idea now where Max had gone.

  “Just one tiny part of the chromosomes, really. The very tip of them—looks a little like those plastic tips at the end of shoelaces. Way back in 1938 those little caps had been discovered, named ‘telomeres.’ Our team found that every time a cell divides, those little caps get shorter and shorter, until the cell starts to die. Our hair falls out. Our bones get brittle. Our spines curve. Our skin wrinkles and sags. We get old.”

  “I saw what you’re doing to those children,” Ben said. “The progerics. I take it you’re experimenting on them.” And who else are you experimenting on? “The world believes you invite them in for a vacation. Some vacation.” No, he chided himself, must remain calm. He struggled to control his rage, keep from showing it.

  Listen to him. Lead him on.

  “True, it’s no vacation for them,” Lenz agreed. “But these poor children do not need vacations. They need a cure! It’s really fascinating, you know, these little young-old people. They’re born old. If you took a cell from a newborn progeric child and put it side by side, under a microscope, with one from a ninety-year-old man—why, even a molecular biologist couldn’t tell the difference! In a progeric, those little tips start out short. Short telomeres, short lives.”

  “What are you doing to them?” Ben asked. He realized his jaw ached from clenching it so hard so long. A mental image flashed of the progeric children in the bottles.

  Dr. Reisinger and Justice Miriam Bateman, Arnold Carr, and the others were straggling out of the room, conversing.

  “Those little shoelace tips, they’re like tiny odometers. Or timing devices, say. We have a hundred trillion cells in our bodies, and each cell has ninety-two telomeres—that makes ten quadrillion little clocks telling our body when it’s time to shut down. We’re preprogrammed to die!” Lenz seemed unable to contain his excitement. “But what if we could somehow reset the clocks, hmm? Keep them from getting shorter? Ah, that was the trick. Well, it turns out that some cells—certain brain cells, for instance—make a chemical, an enzyme, that fixes up their little telomeres, rebuilds them. All of our cells have the ability to make it, but for some reason they don’t—it’s just switched off most of the time. So … what if we could turn that switch on? Keep those little clocks ticking? So elegant, so simple. But I’d be lying to you if I said this was easy to do. Even with all the money in the world, and some of the world’s most brilliant scientists to choose from, it still took decades, and a number of scientific advances, like gene splicing.”

  This was what the killings were about, wasn’t it?

  A neat little irony, Ben thought. People die so that others can live far beyond their natural life span.

  Keep him talking, explaining. Bury the rage. Keep sight of the goal.

  “When did you make your breakthrough?” Ben asked.

  “Around fifteen, twenty years ago.”

  “And why hasn’t anybody else caught up with you?”

  “Others are working in the field, of course. But we’ve got an advantage they lack.”

  “Unlimited funding.” Credit Max Hartman, he thought.

  “That helps, certainly. And the fact that we’ve been working on it pretty much nonstop since the forties. But that’s not the whole story. The big difference is human experimentation. Every ‘civilized’ country in the world has outlawed it. But how much can you really learn from rats or fruit flies, for God’s sake. We made our earliest advances by experimenting on children with progeria, a condition that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the animal world. And we still use progerics, as we continue to refine our understanding of the molecular pathways involved. One day we won’t need them anymore. But we still have so much to learn.”

  “Human experimentation,” Ben said, scarcely concealing his revulsion. There was no difference between Jürgen Lenz and Gerhard Lenz. To them, human beings—sick children, refugees, camp inmates—were nothing more than lab rats. “Like those refugee children in their tents, fenced in out there,” Ben said. “Maybe you brought them in under the guise of ‘humanitarianism.’ But they’re expendable too, aren’t they?” He recalled words that Georges Chardin had spoken to him, and he said them aloud: “The slaughter of the innocents.”

  Lenz bristled. “That’s what some of the angeli rebelli called it, but it’s a rather inflammatory description,” he said. “As such, it only impedes rational deliberation. Yes, some must die that others may live. A disquieting idea, no doubt. But put away the veil of sentimentality for one moment and face the brutal truth. These unfortunate children would otherwise be killed in war, or die from the diseases of poverty—and for what? Instead, they are saviors. They’ll change the world. Is it more ethical to bomb their homes, let them be machine-gunned down, let them die senselessly, as the ‘civilized world’ permits? Or to give them the chance, instead, to alter the course of history? You see, the form of telomerase enzyme that our treatment requires is most readily isolated from the tissues of the central nervous system—the cells of the cerebrum and cerebellum. The quantities are far richer in the young. Unfortunately, it cannot be synthesized: it’s a complex protein, and the shape, the conformation, of the protein is crucial. As with many such complex proteins, they cannot be produced by artificial means. And so … we must harvest it from human beings.”

  “The slaughter of the innocents,” Ben repeated.

  Lenz shrugged. “The sacrifice troubles you, but it has not unduly troubled the world at large.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve no doubt heard the statistics—the fact that twenty thousand children disappear every year. People know, and they shrug. They’ve come to accept it. Perhaps it would provide a measure of consolation to know that these children haven’t perished for no reason. It has taken us years to perfect our assays, techniques, dose levels. There was no other way. Nor will there be in the foreseeable future. We need the tissue. It must be human tissue, and it must be from juveniles. A seven-year-old’s brain—a quart and a half of quivering jelly—is hardly smaller than a grown-up’s, but its yield of telomerase enzymes is ten times as great. It is the greatest, most valuable natural resource on earth, yes? As your countrymen say, a terrible thing to waste.”

  “And so you ‘disappear’ them. Every year. Thousands and thousands of children.”

  “Typically from war-torn regions where their life expectancy would be paltry, anyway. This way, at least, they do not die in vain.”

  “No, they don’t die in vain. They die for vanity. They die so that you and your friends can live forever, isn’t that it?” This is not a man you argue with, Ben thought, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to contain his outrage.

  Lenz scoffed, “Forever? Please, none of us will live forever. All we’re doing is arresting the aging process in some cases, reversing it in others. The enzyme enables us to repair much of the damage to the skin, the integument. Reverse the damage caused by heart disease. As yet, this therapy can only occasionally restore us to the prime of our youth. And even to give someone my age his forty-year-old body back is time-consuming …”

  “These people,” Ben said, “they all come here to … to become younger.”

  “Only a few of them. Most of them are public figures who can’t change their appearance drastically without attracting attention. So they come here, at my invitation, to halt their aging, maybe undo some of the damage that age has inflicted.”

  “Public figures?” Ben shot back mockingly. “They’re all rich and powerful!” He was beginning to understand what Lenz was doing.

  “No, Benjamin. They’re the great ones. The leaders of our society, our culture. The few who advance our civilization. The founders of Sigma came to understand this. They saw that civilization was fragile, and that there was only one way to ensure the continuity that it required. The future of the industrial state had to be protected, sheltered from the storms. Our societies would only advance if we could push back the horizon of human mortality. Year by year, Sigma used whatever tools it had at its disposal, but now the original goals can be advanced by other, more effective means—good God, we’re talking about something far more effective than throwing billions of dollars at coups and political action groups. We’re talking about the formation of a stable, lasting elite.”

  “So these are the leaders of our civilizations …”

  “Precisely.”

  “And you’re the man who leads the leaders.”

  Lenz responded with a thin smile. “Please, Benjamin. I have no interest in boss-man theatrics. But in any organization, there must be a … coordinator.”

  “And there can only be one.”

  A pause. “Ultimately, yes.”

  “And what of those who oppose your ‘enlightened’ regime? I suppose they’re purged from the body politic.”

  “A body must purge toxins if it is to survive, Benjamin.” Lenz spoke with surprising gentleness.

  “What you’re describing isn’t some utopia, Lenz. It’s a slaughterhouse.”

  “Your reproach is as glib as it is vacuous,” Lenz returned. “Life is a matter of trade-offs, Benjamin. You live in a world where vastly greater sums are spent on medications for erectile dysfunction than are spent on tropical diseases that claim the lives of millions every year. And what of your own personal decisions? When you buy a bottle of Dom Perignon, you have spent a sum of money that could have vaccinated a village in Bangladesh, spared lives from the ravages of disease, yes? People will die, Benjamin, as a result of the decisions, the priorities, entailed by your purchase. I’m quite serious: Can you deny that the ninety dollars a bottle of Dom Perignon costs could have easily saved half a dozen lives, perhaps more? Think about it. The bottle will yield seven or eight glasses of wine. Each glass, we can say, represents a life lost.” His eyes were bright, a scientist having solved an equation and moved on to another one. “That is why I say that such trade-offs are inevitable. And once you understand that, you start to ask higher order questions: qualitative questions, not quantitative ones. Here we have the opportunity to vastly extend the useful life span of a great humanitarian or thinker—someone whose contribution to the commonweal is inarguable. Compared to this good, what is the life of a Serbian goatherd? Of an illiterate child who would have otherwise been destined to a life of poverty and petty criminality. Of a Gypsy girl who would otherwise spend her days picking the pockets of tourists visiting Florence, her nights picking lice out of her hair. You have been taught that lives are sacrosanct, and yet every day you make decisions signifying an awareness that some lives are more valuable than others. I mourn for those who have given their lives for the greater good. I truly do. I genuinely wish that the sacrifice they made was unnecessary. But I also know that every great achievement in the history of our species has come at the cost of human lives. ‘There is no document of civilization that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism’: a great thinker said that, a thinker who died too young.”

  Ben stood blinking, speechless.

  “Come,” Lenz said, “there’s someone who wants to say hello to you. An old friend of yours.”

  Ben gaped. “Professor Godwin?”

  “Ben.”

  It was his old college mentor, long since retired. But his posture seemed straighter, his once wrinkled skin was now smooth and pink. He looked younger by several decades than his eighty-two years. John Barnes Godwin, emeritus historian of Europe in the twentieth century, was vigorous. His handshake was firm.

  “Good Lord,” Ben said. If he hadn’t known Godwin, he’d have put his age in the early fifties.

  Godwin was one of the elect. Of course: he was a behind-the-scenes kingmaker, he was powerful and extremely well connected.

  Godwin stood before him as mind-boggling proof of Lenz’s achievement. They stood in a small antechamber off the great hall, which was comfortably furnished with couches and easy chairs, throw pillows and reading lamps, and racks of newspapers and magazines in a variety of languages.

  Godwin seemed pleased at Ben’s astonishment. Jürgen Lenz beamed.

  “You must not know what to make of all this,” Godwin said.

  It took Ben a few seconds before he could think of a response. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “It’s extraordinary, what Dr. Lenz has achieved. We’re all deeply grateful to him. But I think we’re also aware of the significance, the gravity, of his gift. In essence, we’ve been given our lives back. Not our youth so much as—as another chance. A reprieve from death.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Is it against nature? Maybe. The way curing cancer is against nature. Emerson, remember, told us that old age is ‘the only disease.’”

  His eyes gleamed. Ben listened in stunned silence.

  In college, Ben had always addressed him as Professor Godwin, but now he chose not to address him by name at all. He said simply, “Why?”

  “Why? On a personal level? Do you have to ask? I’ve been given another lifetime. Perhaps even another two lifetimes.”

  “Will you gentlemen excuse me?” Lenz interrupted. “The first helicopter is about to leave, and I must say good-bye.” He bustled, almost sprinted, out of the room.

  “Ben, when you get to be my age, you don’t buy green bananas,” Godwin resumed. “You don’t take on book projects you don’t think you’ll live to complete. But think of how much I can do now. Until Dr. Lenz called, I’d felt as if I’d struggled and worked and learned for decades to get where I am, to learn what I know, to gain the understanding I have—yet at any moment everything might be snatched away: ‘If youth but knew, if old age but could,’ right?”

  “Even if all this is true—”

  “You have eyes. You can see what’s in front of you. Look at me, for God’s sake! I used not to be able to climb the stairs at Firestone Library, and now I can run.” Godwin, Ben realized, was not just a successful experiment, he was one of them—a conspirator with Lenz. Didn’t he know about the cruelty, the murders?

  “But have you seen what’s going on here—the child refugees on the lawn? Thousands of abducted children? That doesn’t bother you?”

  Godwin looked visibly uncomfortable. “I’ll admit there are aspects of all this that I prefer not to know about, and I’ve always made that clear.”

  “We’re talking about the ongoing murder of thousands of children!” Ben said. “The treatment requires it. Lenz calls it ‘harvesting,’ a pretty word for systematic slaughter.”

  “It’s …” Godwin faltered. “Well, it’s morally complex. ‘Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona.’”

  “‘For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous,’” Ben translated. “Publilius Syrus. You taught me that.”

  Godwin, too. He’d gone over; he’d joined Lenz. “What’s important is that the cause has genuine merit.” He ambled over to a leather sofa. Ben sat facing him on the adjacent sofa.

  “And were you involved in Sigma’s cause in the old days as well?”

  “Yes, for decades. And I feel so privileged to be around for this whole new phase. Under Lenz’s leadership, things are going to be very different.”

  “I gather not all your colleagues agreed.”

  “Oh yes. The angeli rebelli, Lenz calls them. Rebel angels. There were a handful of people who wanted to put up a fight. Out of vanity or shortsightedness. Either they never trusted Lenz, or they felt demoted by the fact that new leadership had emerged. I guess a few of them had qualms about the … sacrifices that had to be made. Any time there’s a shift in power, you’ve got to expect some forms of resistance. But a few years ago, when Lenz allowed that his project would soon be ready for actual trials, he made it clear the collective would have to recognize his leadership. He didn’t do it out of any sense of self-interest, either. It’s just that some difficult decisions would have to be made about who was going to be—well, admitted into the program. Inducted into the permanent elite. The risk of factionalism was too great. Lenz was the leader we needed. Most of us recognized that. A few didn’t.”

  “Tell me, does your plan ultimately call for making this treatment available to everyone, to the masses? Or just what he calls ‘the great ones’?”

  “Well, you raise a serious point. I was flattered that Jürgen selected me to be a kind of recruiter, as it were, for this august group of world … luminaries, I suppose. The Wiedergeborenen, as Dr. Lenz calls us—the Reborn. We’re reaching out far beyond the Sigma rump group. I brought Walter in, you know, and my old friend Miriam Bateman—Justice Miriam Bateman. I’ve been charged with helping choose those who seem deserving of it. From around the world—China, Russia, Europe, Africa—everywhere, without prejudice. Except for a prejudice in favor of greatness.”